Jonathan Wyatt

Larry Russell

Ken Gale

Five scholars met as writers at a workshop at the 2007 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry and made a commitment to write over the following year to, for and with each other. It became an experiment in the craft of autoethnography, exploring questions of intimacy and connection manifested through collaborative writing. Each year since then, the authors have returned to the Congress to read a small anthology of the year’s writing—and to decide whether or not to continue. This book covers the first two years of that writing, offering stories of how writing touches, how it writes bodies into being and in between. It is an affecting, radical work, exploring love and intimacy as scholarly, messy, complex methodology—writing that often affirms and sometimes disturbs.

An Intimate Scholarly Collaboration

How Writing Touches

In this unique work, Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt bring together three areas of scholarship: collaborative writing as method of inquiry, the philosophical approaches of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and the performativity of both writing and the “self”. The book is a reflexive exploration into the theory and practice of collaborative writing, with their between-the-twos—sequences of exchanged writings using a variety of forms and genres—at the book’s heart. Their collaboration offers an experimental, transgressive and nomadic inquiry into subjectivity. Based upon the authors’ joint doctoral dissertation, the book draws for its theoretical base primarily from the work of Deleuze, from both his philosophical “figures” and the insights that he offers into his collaborations with others. It also tells a story, conveying a sense of a relationship developing over time. This book will interest both academics and postgraduate students in the field of qualitative inquiry, including those involved in narrative inquiry, cultural, communication and performance studies, and autoethnography.

A Nomadic Inquiry into Collaborative Writing and Subjectivity

Between the Two

Bronwyn Davies

Susanne Gannon

This book is a passionate engagement with Gilles Deleuze and collaborative writing, in which four writers explore together the insights that Deleuze has contributed to the topic. This powerful and complex text, which will appeal to scholars within qualitative inquiry, investigates the question of how we might begin to write, together, on what Deleuze would call an immanent plane of composition. On such a Deleuzian plane, or plateau, the writers seek to bond with Deleuze, to open up with him a new stream of thought and of being.

An Immanent Plane of Composition

Deleuze and Collaborative Writing

Sue Porter

Davina Kirkpatrick

Jane Speedy

Artful Collaborative Inquiry comprises essays created collectively by a group of scholars and artists, the majority of whom have several decades of experience of working together. The book challenges commonly-held, individualistic beliefs about ownership, authorship and scholarly and artistic ethics and practices. The essays exemplify the entangled kinds of scholarly and artistic works that emerge in a post-human world, where humans, other species, environments, things and other matters, all matter and are of equal concern in the conduct of ethical artful scholarship. Situated at the (messy) crossroads where contemporary scholarship and artistic practice converge, the seamless mo(ve)ment and interplay between text and image make up the main body of the work in this book. The chapters combine the playful use and merging of time, space and place, researcher and researched, to give a unique exemplar of research and creativity in the rapidly emerging field of collaborative scholarship. It will be of particular interest to creative and qualitative scholars wishing to conduct more artful research, and artists engaging with scholarship.

Making and Writing Creative, Qualitative Research

Artful Collaborative Inquiry

Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing is a sharp, lively exploration of the connections between therapy, stand-up comedy, and writing as a method of inquiry; and of how these connections can be theorized through the author’s new concept: creative-relational inquiry. Engaging, often poignant, stories combine with rich scholarship to offer the reader provocative, original insights. Wyatt writes about his work as a therapist with his client, Karl, as they meet and talk together. He tells stories of his experiences attending comedy shows in Edinburgh and of his own occasional performances. He brings alive the everyday profound through vignettes and poems of work, travel, visiting his mother, mourning his late father, and more. The book’s drive, however, is in bringing together therapy, stand-up, and writing as a method of inquiry to mobilise theory, drawing in particular from Deleuze and Guattari, the new materialisms, and affect theory. Through this diffractive work, the text formulates and develops creative-relational inquiry. With its combination of fluent story-telling and smart, theoretical propositions, Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing offers compelling possibilities both for qualitative scholars who have an interest in narrative, performative, and embodied scholarship, and those who desire to bring current, complex, theories to bear upon their research practices.

Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry

Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing

Who are we with—and without—families? How do we relate as children to our parents, as parents to our children? How are parent-child relationships—and familial relationships in general—made and (not) maintained? Informed by narrative, performance studies, poststructuralism, critical theory, and queer theory, contributors to this collection use autoethnography—a method that uses the personal to examine the cultural—to interrogate these questions. The essays write about/around issues of interpersonal distance and closeness, gratitude and disdain, courage and fear, doubt and certainty, openness and secrecy, remembering and forgetting, accountability and forgiveness, life and death. Throughout, family relationships are framed as relationships that inspire and inform, bind and scar—relationships replete with presence and absence, love and loss. An essential text for anyone interested in autoethnography, personal narrative, identity, relationships, and family communication.

Jonathan Wyatt

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